Services.

Gravity offers a highly creatrive and innovative approach to destination market. Through our travel PR and integrated marketing, we take place to people so those people will then visit places.

Gravity's extensive experience of working with the airline industry -- including Stan Abbott's in-house airline experience -- means we can also offer a variety of consultancy support services to assist airlines in route analysis and strategic development.

Although our core expertise is in destination marketing and airlines, we have a growing portfolio of clients in other sectors, ranging from food and drink to the energy sector and the security industry.

We also work with businesses, particularly SMEs on business planning and strategy development, particularly in the export sector, Stan Abbott is a UK Trade & Investment-accredited Virtual Export Manager, with particular expertise and experience in the Nordic countries, French speaking markets and Canada.

Gravity has built its reputation through its peerless work in building the reputation and awareness of destinations and, consequently, developing their tourist allure and numbers. Our particular focus is the airline industry, where our philosophy is a simple one: airlines build traffic by encouraging more people to travel, or by encouraging the same people to travel more often. We build dynamic partnerships with tourist authorities and business drivers to identify and create reasons for people to travel. We then tell the world about those reasons. In our experience, every destination has a story to tell but that story can get diluted. Gravity destinations are served full-strength: we bring them into sharp focus through carefully dovetailed PR and marketing activity.

At Gravity we don't believe in "silos". No organisation chart should look like a tree or, worse, a row of individual plant pots. Good organisations that are flexible in response to change and new opportunities are a matrix of connections that cross internal boundaries, so as to maximise the opportunities presented from within their own resources.

When we work with organisations we seek to stimulate that process and to reflect it in the face that your business presents to the world. That's why we never talk about "just PR" or "just marketing" or "just advertising". The most effective campaigns are a clever fusion of communications via a variety of complementary channels, all focussed on an easily understood "call to action".

Some of our most successful work has been in the delivery of integrated campaigns for fascinating destinations – a fact recognised when the CIPR awarded us a Gold for our work in putting Shetland firmly on the visitor map. We always promise clients a minimum return on investment of 10:1 for the PR elements of our campaigns, though we usually deliver many times that figure. In our Shetland campaign we secured priceless live Sky TV coverage of the arrival of the first direct air service from London.

Complement this with an eye-catching campaign on the London Underground, a viral game, mailshots and other smart ideas, and you'll understand how we got the world talking about the UK's most northerly islands.

Another big success story was our long association with Luxair: in a time of immense change at this small state airline we were the one constant, helping Luxair to turn the tables on its opposition at London City Airport, delivering a majority share of an increased market as we told the story of "Europe's great undiscovered little city break".

Successes like these made Gravity the natural choice of full-service communcations agency to work with Durham City Vision, a complex public-private partnership charged with helping the World Heritage city of Durham to realise its economic potential. We were proud to be part of a sensitive five-year project that has seen new life breathed into the old city, reinvigorating public spaces and launching a major programme of public events which now boasts the amazing Lumière light festival as its cornerstone.

Gravity principal Stan Abbott is a highly accomplished publisher and editor of books, magazines and newspapers. He owes his first News Editor, Chris Brayne at the Yorkshire Evening Press, York, a debt of gratitude "for drumming into me the most rigorous discipline as regards accuracy, attention to detail, economy of language and good grammar". Just as a smart jumper looks best on a good model, so good prose reads best only when there's a solid, well-crafted structure to an article.

Brayne's tutelage helped Stan exit journalism school as "best in class" and he went on to win praise and prizes as both a writer and sub-editor for national and regional newspapers and as the editor of many books and magazines. Publications he edits or has edited include Eastern Airways Magazine, NHS Magazine, Med Life (for GB Airways), New Canada Magazine, Wings! (the national hang gliding magazine), National Parks Today, Catch (for the Environment Agency) and a variety of other business-to-business and consumer magazines and newspapers. He has also commissioned and edited more than 30 books, particularly in the fields of transport and leisure. He is the author or co-author in his own right of various books in transport and tourism, most notably two books on the successful campaign to save the celebrated Settle & Carlisle Railway.

His right-hand woman through much of this activity has been Gravity's Head of Design, Barbara Allen, and their collective experience means they can translate a loose client concept into an attractive and engaging printed product.

Among Gravity's specialisms is the production of materials in more than one language: we have regularly produced publications in French, the Nordic languages, Welsh, and Spanish.

Inherent in all this is wide experience in buying print and an instinct for placing every print job with the right printer at the right price. Entrust your print-buying to the experts!

The Gravity team has wide experience across public, private and third sectors. Principal, Stan Abbott, has worked within both large groups and medium -size companies and as a consultant to large organisations in all three sectors. We are proud to have worked with individuals and small groups to help realise a business dream, identifying sources of funding, organising team-building events and helping to develop strategy. Stan currently enjoys strategic roles supporting senior management at Atlantic Airways, the national airline of the Faroe Islands, and at Lockpoint, an innovative company in banking and high-value business security. Stan also lends his strategic business experience in the third sector, serving as a Trustee with international touring theatre company, Théâtre Sans Frontières, based at Hexham, and at Bede's World, a tourist attraction dedicated to the life of the Venerable Bede, at Jarrow, South Tyneside.

Gravity has amassed many years' experience in working with SMEs and larger organisations in the development of their export communications strategies and tactics. We worked for many years with Regional Language Network, an initiative dedicated to smartening up the act of UK companies looking to move into new overseas markets.

As Head of Marketing at UK regional airline, Gill Airways, Gravity principal, Stan Abbott, was responsible for managing the airline's key franchise operation for Air France and for developing strategic partnerships with other airlines across Europe and beyond. Having built a range of ticketing and codeshare agreements with airlines with the aim of building feeder traffic to Gill Airways destinations, Stan developed first-hand business experience in countries including France, Germany, Norway, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg and the Faroe Islands as well as in working with industry bodies, including IATA.

Gravity has enjoyed the fruits of Stan's career, developing its own business interests in many of the countries in which Stan has worked, as well as in North America and South Africa. You can access Stan's exporting experience at a subsidised rate through UK Trade & Investment, for which Stan is an accredited Virtual Export Manager.